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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Even Flash I keep it on click to play. Doesn't bother me much, except when I want to view YouTube videos and such and I don't watch videos all day.

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ClickToPlugin on Safari is reeeeally good at finding the html5 alternative for Flash videos. It's actually the only thing that's keeping me on Safari, if only someone could port it to firefox…

Greasemonkey + ViewTube (http://isebaro.com/viewtube/?ln=en) + ViewTube Plus (https://openuserjs.org/scripts/hamsterbacke/ViewTubePlus).

I tried those already, but It just won't work as consistently and as easily.

Actually click-to-play is what made YouTube usable to me. Now it is broken and I had to write a user script to fix it. When I brows YouTube and search for something, I want to open several search results/related videos in background tabs. But idiotic YouTube auto-plays videos. Autoplay is one of my most hated anti-patterns. I wrote a user script/chrome plugin that replaces all video page links with base64 URLs that insert a hop to the actual video page (including preview image) so I can keep using YouTube like I want it. I made it so that when i directly click a link it still goes to the watch page directly.

See: https://github.com/panzi/intercept-youtube-links

Between the HTML5 player and youtube-dl, I don't need Flash for YouTube at all, and I haven't noticed its absence in years.

The only problem with click-to-play is a lot of sites did their feature detect wrong and only try the HTML5 player if the browser doesn't list Flash support. If you use click-to-play, it still lists the Flash plugin as available so e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, etc. will load the Flash UI rather the faster, higher-quality path.

I allow my FF to have Flash click to play enabled on all sites except on YouTube. It can be set to be click to play for all sites and then you can add specific sites to be the exception.

I've looked for the interface to add exceptions in the plugin menus and couldn't find it...where is it? I'm currently using Flashblock, which is nice, but I'd rather deal with the problem "natively" if possible.

IIRC the site-specific permissions interface is getting an overhaul, but you can currently get there by right-clicking the page -> view page info -> permissions.

> IIRC the site-specific permissions interface is getting an overhaul

I had completely forgotten about that page but you're probably thinking about: about:permissions

Don't think there's any GUI way to get to it, it feels like years since I last saw it. Also, I don't have any plug-ins so can't check if it lists those there.

I find the Firefox built in Plugin click-to-play is horrible to use, and simply broken for the way I browse.

There is no way to disable / hide the "enable plugins" message. There is no way to temporarily enable plugins for a single page load.

Flashblock works great.

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